“Google has passed Apple as the most valuable technology company in the world — on one measure,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

In market capitalization, “Apple is still well ahead, with a market cap of $378 billion versus Google’s $286 billion,” WSJ reports. “But the market caps of both companies are swelled by their huge bank accounts. Strip out Apple’s $145 billion of net cash as of March, and Google’s $45 billion. This leaves an enterprise value of $233 billion for Apple, but $241 billion for Google.”

WSJ writes, “Apple also recently gave back the title of world’s biggest company by market cap to oil major Exxon Mobil. But having its arch-rival creep up on it must be more disconcerting.”

Clearly, the most valuable technology company in the world is Apple Inc., not Google Inc.

Only when you penalize Apple by removing their colossal bank account, $100 billion in excess of Google’s, no less, while rewarding Google for having $100 billion less in the bank than Apple, can you concoct a measure about which you can laughably claim that Apple is disconcerted.

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21 Comments

Oh. GLASS. That’s amazing. I don’t care if Google loves prematuring academic research ideas under their so-called Google-focused research program, and take those ideas from MIT, Standford, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and etc (you name it) and markets them as Google’s projects.

Just brings out something new, or anything Wired magazine named as cool, and release all those lab-level prototypes as trend setting products, then we will believe in your stock value.

Apple, who cares about your real innovation. I can’t see it NOW. Show me NOW. You owe me OUR innovation.

Apple. Why can’t you learn from Google’s Eric? You are losing the game to this techno politician, who has been lobbying greatly for Google, you know? This is the best marketing approach unlike yours. Sergey and Larry are just Eric’s puppies, who suddenly think they are visionaries of tech (besides search).

But it’s all fine. They Think Therefore They Are. Same with the anal-ysts… Done whining.

Who cares how long Tim Cook has been CEO? This is APPLE about which we are concerned! It does not matter if it is Tim Cook’s tenure or Steve Jobs’ tenure or even Mike Markkula’s tenure. In the vast majority of customers’ minds it’s Apple, not the CEO that matters. Hell, I’d dare say that 90% of Apple’s customers don’t know who the CEO is!

iMac (which restarted the “personal” in personal computers and restarted the all in one craze) was introduced 6 May 1998.
iPod (which really ramped up the personal music player business) was introduced on 23 December 2001 — 1,327 days after the iMac.
iPhone (which revolutionized the smart phone segment) was introduced 9 January 2007 — 1,843 days after the iPod
iPad (which revolutionized the tablet market) was introduced 27 January 2010 — 1,114 days after the iPhone
Today is 26 June 2013. It’s been 1,246 days since the iPad. That’s longer than the period between the iPhone and the iPad. THAT’s why people are starting to wonder!

True, the average interceding period had been 1,428 days. Apple has about six months before they exceed that average. If they don’t come out with something revolutionary by the end of this year people WILL start to very loudly question Apple’s innovation ability.

You are 100% missing the point. It’s not about what other companies have, or have not, done. It’s about what Apple has, or has not, done.

Expectations for Apple are different than expectations for any other company. That is just reality. That’s been reality since the introduction of the Apple ][. Deal with it.

AND, for the average person it is not…
“Lie to me once and I may forgive you, lie to me hundreds of times and I take everything you say with a grain of salt.”
For the average person it IS…
“Lie to me once and I may forgive you, Lie to me hundreds of times, and I’m likely to believe it.”

Sure the expectations for Apple are greater than for other companies. But the point about Cook is that the expectations have gone nuts. Totally irrational. Even Apple can only invent wholly new product categories every 3-5 years.

One thing to note, they may only do it every 3-5 years, but when they do it, Apple ends up with large, valuable new businesses. Google may show off these countless research experiments throughout the year, but they just never turn into new significant businesses. Not even once.

I agree with you, I like Tim And I don’t think Steve would not have chose him without reason. I’m willing to be patient with him. However I did really like Steve’s aggressive style. I always felt his passion for the company,

I always felt that he was always looking
out for Apple’s best interests in any situation… I felt confident in him that he could out negotiate anyone.

Which is why I wish Apple would turn Siri into a full blown search engine. Even if they only had 10% market share, that would be mostly Apple users–perhaps the most lucrative customers on the planet. It would take a tremendous chunk out of Google’s ass. They want to encroach on Apple’s turf, then hit them back where it hurts most.

For Apple, the proper place for a search engine is under the hood, an unseen component of a well-integrated system rather than a gratuitous display of complexity. A proper integrated system should present a well-designed user interface, with dashboard, sensors and motion controls, the user ensconced in a zone of safety and comfort.

Siri is the front end to a handful of crowd-sourced and canonical databases and other resources and merely defaults to a straight-up search engine (like Bing). Siri’s strength is in natural-language recognition combined with increasingly advanced interpretive algorithms: it’s this that competes with Google’s text box and analytic engine.

The real battle taking place is the one to read your mind. Google would seem to have the upper hand: it knows a lot about you: better context for parsing your requests. Apple’s approach is more universal: learn more each day about what people actually want when they speak, and try to deliver that. Google instead delivers you to advertisers.

To add to MDN’s comments. Google paid 9 percent in federal taxes while apple paid 26 percent. Who gets hauled in front of congress? Cook of apple while the eric the mole is snickering on the phone with his pals in congress.

Also, amazon does predatory pricing and apple is the one sued by the DOJ. Again the great bozo must have been snickering while playing golf with the hypocrites in the executive branch.

It is amazing that china is taken to task for exact same thing amazon does. In fact, china is not really dumping. They just produce goods lower. I bet they still make money, while amazon is actually loosing money. Bozo does not care so long as he maximizes the price his options are being sold at.

I’m really old school about corporate financials (and it causes lots of “interesting” discussions with the CFO and CEO!). The only three things that matter to me are (based upon annual and prior five year totals — I refuse to get caught up in a quarter by quarter by quarter squabble)
1. Book Value: if you HAD to sell every company asset in the next 60 days and end up with a pile of cash in the parking lot, how big a pile of cash would that be? (I know that’s not how CPAs do the “Book Value” evaluation, but that’s how I think of it.)
2. Gross revenue. That’s pretty self explanatory.
3. Gross profit: For me this is before interest, taxes, depreciation, or amortization are taken into account (the so called EBITDA number).

You can play with the financial statistics of any company several billion different ways and come up with any answer you want. But I always go back to these three values on a yearly and 5 year running average basis.

I haven’t done the comparison between Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, Microsoft, and the rest based upon these three metrics, but I’m sure it would not paint a picture where Apple is surpassed by any of them.

Anyone care to do the arithmetic (it’s not even math) and report back to those who read MDN?

Ok to follow this logic one has to accept the the valuation of Apple and Google are both accurate and fair. How in the world can anyone believe that? Google’s PE is in the 20s and Apple’s is in the low 9s. How does one justify that?

Holiday 2013 Apple will have all new products and the competition will have all OLD products.

APPL will bend like a reed in the wind and snap back twice as strong… this dip is all about product timing being confused with product delay. The rest of the industry copies Apple, so it is important to make the competition miss the holiday quarter. Tim Cook is very competitive, which is why Steve chose him.